this is my Opening Statement in the matter of
David Irving vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah
E. Lipstadt.

I appear as a litigant in person, and the
Defendants are represented by Mr. Richard
Rampton and Miss Rogers of Counsel and
by Mr. Anthony Julius. There were originally
three other Defendants, who can be characterised
here as booksellers; but your Lordship will observe
that they no longer figure in this action, a
settlement having been reached.

This is an action in Libel arising from the
publication by the First Defendant of a book,
entitled Denying the Holocaust, by the Second
Defendant, Professor Lipstadt.

As Your Lordship is aware, the Work complained
of has attracted considerable attention, both in
this country and in the United States and elsewhere
since it was first published in 1993. Your Lordship
will have before you my Statement of Claim in which
I set out the grounds for my complaint, the
consequence of which I am asking that the
Defendants be ordered to pay damages of an amount
which I will venture to suggest, and I will invite
Your Lordship issue an injunction against further
publication of this work and that the Defendants
should make the usual undertakings.

It is almost thirty years to the day since I
first set foot in these Law Courts and I trust that
Your Lordship will allow me to digress for two or
three minutes, being (in my submission) something
of an historian, on the history of those events;
because they are not without relevance to the
proceedings upon which we are about to embark.

The occasion of that visit to this building, was
an action heard before Mr. Justice Lawton, which
became well known to law students as Cassell vs.
Broome and Another. It too was a Libel action, and
I am ashamed to admit that I was "Another", having
written a book on a naval operation, The
Destruction of Convoy PQ.17.

That was the only actively fought Libel action
in which I became engaged in thirty years of
writing. There were two reasons for this
abstinence: first, I became more prudent about how
I wrote; and second, I was taught to turn the other
cheek.

The man who taught me the latter lesson was my
first publisher. He had signed up my first book,
The Destruction of Dresden, which was eventually
published in 1963.

I had been approached in about 1961 by a well
known English publisher, Mr. William Kimber. When I
visited him in his offices -- which were on a site
which has long since been buried by a luxury hotel,
the Berkeley, in Belgravia -- I found him
surrounded by files and documents, rather as we are
all in this court room today. He wore an air of
exhaustion.

Your Lordship may remember that Mr. Kimber and
his author Mr. Leon Uris had become involved
through a book which Uris had written, entitled
Exodus, in a Libel action brought by a London
doctor who had been obliged to serve at Auschwitz.
That case was also heard before Mr. Justice Lawton.
There was one other similarity that closes this
particular circle of coincidence: like me now, Mr.
Kimber was in consequence also obliged to spend two
or three years of his life wading, as he put it,
"knee-deep" through the most appalling stories of
atrocities and human degradation.

That day he advised me never, ever, to become
involved in Libel litigation. I might add that,
with one exception that I shall later mention, I
have heeded his advice.

There have since then been one or two minor
legal skirmishes, which have not involved much
"bloodshed": there was an action against an author,
which I foolishly started at the same time as the
PQ.17 case and, having lost the latter, was obliged
for evident reasons to abandon on relatively
painless conditions; and a more recent action
against a major London newspaper, who put into my
mouth, no doubt inadvertently, some particularly
offensive words which had in fact been uttered by
Adolf Hitler; that newspaper settled out of Court
with me on terms which were eminently
acceptable.

I have often thought of Mr. Kimber's predicament
since the 1960s, and more particularly the last
three years. I have been plunged into precisely the
same "knee-deep" position, ever since I issued the
originating writs in this action in September 1996.
If I am late with the bundles and papers upon which
this Court relies, I can only plead this in
mitigation.

I have never held myself out to be a Holocaust
expert, nor have I written books about what is now
called the Holocaust: if I am an expert in anything
at all, I may be so immodest as to submit that it
is in the role that Adolf Hitler played in the
propagation of World War Two and in the decisions
which he made, and the knowledge on which he based
those decisions.

As a peripheral matter to that topic, on which I
have written a number of books, I inevitably
investigated the extent to which Hitler
participated in or had cognisance of the Holocaust.
That was the sum total of my involvement as a book
author up to the launching of these writs.

Since then, because of the tactics chosen by the
Defendants, I have been obliged, willy nilly, to
become something of an expert, through no desire of
my own. To my utmost distaste it has become evident
that it is no longer possible to write pure
history, untrammelled and uninfluenced by politics,
once one ventures into this unpleasant field.

I have done my best to prepare the case that
follows, but I respectfully submit that I do not
have any duty to become an expert on the Holocaust;
it is not saying anything unknown to this Court, I
remind those present that, the Defendants having
pleaded justification, as they have, it is not
incumbent upon me as the Claimant to prove the
wrongness of what they have published. It is for
them to prove that what they wrote was true.

I intend to show that far from being a
"Holocaust denier", I have repeatedly drawn
attention to major aspects of the Holocaust and
have described them, and I have provided historical
documents both to the community of scholars and to
the general public, of which they were completely
unaware before I discovered these documents, and
published and translated them.

It will be found that I selflessly provided
copies of the documents, that I had at great
expense myself unearthed foreign archives even to
my rival historians, as I felt that it was
important in the interests of general historical
research that should be aware of these documents (I
am referring for example to the Bruns Report, which
we shall shortly hear; and to the dossier on Kurt
Aumeier in British files, a dossier which even the
Defence Experts admit is one of the most important
historical finds, since the writings of Rudolph
Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, were
published after the war.

There is one essential plea I wish to make of
this Court; I am aware that the Defendants have
expended a considerable sum of money in researching
all over again the harrowing story of what actually
happened in what they call the Holocaust.

I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the
Court should take no interest in that tragedy. The
Court may well disagree with me, and show a
profound interest in it; but in my submission, we
have to avoid the temptations of raking over the
history of what happened in Poland or in Russia
fifty years ago: what is moot here is not what
happened in those sites of atrocities -- but what
happened over the last thirty-two years, on my
writing desk in my apartment off Grosvenor
Square.

To justify her allegations of manipulation and
distortion, it will not suffice for Professor
Lipstadt to show, if she can, that I misrepresented
what happened, but the following that I knew what
happened; and that I perversely and deliberately,
for whatever purpose, portrayed it differently from
how I knew it to have happened.

That is what manipulation and distortion means,
and the other, though fundamental, story of what
actually happened is neither here nor there. In
effect, this inquiry should not leave the four
walls of my study: it should look at the papers
that lay before me -- and not before some other,
magnificently funded researcher or scholar -- and
at the manuscript that I then produced on the basis
of my own limited sources.

My Lord, if we were to seek a title for this
Libel action, I would venture to suggest "PICTURES
AT AN EXECUTION".

Your Lordship may or may not be aware that I
have had a reputation as an historian and as an
investigative writer arising from the thirty or so
works which I have published in English and other
languages over the years since 1961. I am the
author of many scores of articles in serious and
respected newspapers, including over the years in
this country The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday
Telegraph, the Jewish Chronicle, the Sunday
Express, the Evening Standard, Encounter, and
publications of similar repute in Germany, my
articles have appeared in newspapers ranging from
Die Welt, Die Welt am Sonntag, and magazines and
journals like Stern, Der Spiegel, Neue
Illustrierte, Quick.

My books have appeared between hard covers under
the imprint of the finest publishing houses. I
might mention in this country the imprints of
William Kimber Ltd., Cassell & Co. Ltd.,
Macmillan Ltd., Hodder & Stoughton, Penguin and
Allen Lane and others. As the Second Defendant is I
understand an American citizen, it might be
meritorious for me to add that my works have also
been published by her country's leading publishing
houses, including the Viking Press; Little, Brown;
Simon & Schuster; Holt, Reinhardt, Winston; St
Martin's Press; and a score of no less reputable
paperback publishing houses.

Each of those published works by me contained in
or near the title page a list of my previous
publications and frequently a sample of the
accolades bestowed on my works by the leading names
of literature and historiography on both sides of
the Atlantic.

This happy situation, namely having my works
published in the leading publishing houses of the
world, ended a year or two ago under circumstances
which I shall venture, if Your Lordship permits, to
set out later in my remarks. Suffice it to say that
this very day the Australia/Israel Review has
published in Sydney a presumably well-informed
article, coming as it does from their corner, which
provides one missing link in the circumstances
under which St. Martin's Press finally terminated
their contract to publish my book Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich:

... One of the catalysts for the case was
Irving's experience with American publisher St
Martin's Press, which, after being warned by
Lipstadt and others about Irving's approach to
history, then cancelled its agreement to publish
Irving's book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third
Reich in the US.

So these Defendants have done very real damage
to my professional existence. May I first of all
set out the very real pecuniary damage which can be
done to an author by an attack on his reputation.
It is not merely that he suffers injury and hurt to
his feelings from unjustified attacks, whatever
their nature.

An author, by virtue of his trade, lives a
precarious financial existence. A tenured Professor
or other scholar can look forward to a brief
career, lengthy vacations, high rewards, and
eventually a pension. Perhaps some members of the
legal profession enjoy the same fortunate
expectations.

A writer leads a much lonelier and more
hazardous existence. When he first embarks on his
career he may write a string of works that are
never published. I was fortunate in this respect;
when I first started advertising in The Times in
1961, inviting British airmen who had taken part in
the principle operations of Royal Air Force Bomber
Command to come forward, among those who contacted
me was Mr. William Kimber, a publisher of great
repute who himself felt deeply about the ethical
questions raised by these saturation bombing
operations.

I therefore did not have the usual problem that
faces most first-time authors, namely that of
crossing the difficult threshold from being an
unpublished, to a published author. My first book,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, was serialised by The
Sunday Telegraph' and attracted much critical
acclaim. It was only then that I took the, perhaps
fateful, decision to become a writer.

If I may now advance rapidly some twenty or
thirty years -- and I sense the Court's relief -- I
would repeat a brief conversation I had with my
Accountant, at a time when I was earning more than
£100,000 p.a. in royalties. My Accountant, no
doubt with his eye on the commission involved,
asked what steps I had taken in anticipation of
retirement. My immodest reply was that I did not
intend to retire, and when he murmured something
about pensions, I replied that my books were my
pension fund.

If I may explain that remark: if an author has
written a good book it will be published and
republished, and on each occasion a fresh ripple of
royalties reaches the author's bank account.
Admittedly the ripples become smaller as the years
recede, but if he has written enough books in his
30 or 40 years of creativity then the ripples
together make waves large enough to sustain him
into and beyond the years of retirement. Indeed,
they should also provide something of a legacy for
his children, of whom I still have 4.

That situation no longer obtains.

By virtue of the activities of the Defendants,
in particular of the Second Defendant, and of those
who funded her and guided her hand, I have since
1996 seen one fearful publisher after another
falling away from me, declining to reprint my
works, refusing to accept new commissions and
turning their backs on me when I approach.

In private, the senior editors at those
publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a
friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York
restaurants -- and then lament that if they were to
sign a contract with me on a new book, there would
always be somebody in their publishing house who
would object. Such is the nature of the odium that
has been generated by the waves of hatred
recklessly propagated against me by the
Defendants.

In short my "pension" has vanished, as assuredly
as if I had bee employed by one of those companies
taken over by the late Mr. Robert Maxwell.

I am not submitting that it is these Defendants
alone who have single handedly wrought this
disaster upon me. I am not even denying that I may
have been partly to blame for it myself.

Had I written books about the Zulu Wars, as the
Air Ministry earnestly advised me in 1963, when my
book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN was first
published, I would no doubt not have faced this
hatred.

Unfortunately, World War Two became my area of
expertise; I generated a personal archive of
documents, a network of sources and contacts, a
language ability, and a facility to research in
foreign archives, and eventually a constituency of
readers who expected and wanted me to write only
about the Third Reich and its criminal
leadership.

What obliges me to make these sweeping opening
remarks, is that I shall maintain that the
Defendants did not act alone in their determination
to destroy my career, and to vandalise my
legitimacy as an historian. They were part of an
organised international endeavour at achieving
precisely that. I have seen the papers. I have
copies of the documents. I shall show them to this
Court. I know how they did it, and I now know
why.

Nearly all of these villains acted beyond the
jurisdiction of these Courts. Some of them however
acted within, and I have on one disastrous occasion
tried to proceed against them too.

I mention here and, only in a few words, that
one example: as the Court will no doubt hear, I was
expelled in the most demeaning circumstances from
Canada in November 1992. I need not go into the
background of that event here, but I shall
certainly do so later if in their attempts to
blacken my name further, the Defendants indulge in
that exercise in this Court.

Seeking to establish why Canada, a friendly
Government, of a country which I had entered
unhindered for thirty years or more, should
suddenly round upon me as savagely as a rottweiler,
I used all the appliances of Canadian law to
establish what had gone on behind closed doors.

I discovered in the files of the Canadian
Government, using that country's Access to
Information Act, a mysterious and anonymous
document blackening my name which had been planted
there for the purpose of procuring precisely the
ugly consequence that had flowed from it in
1992.

Among the stupid lies that this anonymous
document contained about me, was the suggestion
that I had married my first wife because she was
"the daughter of one of General Francisco Franco's
top generals", in order to ingratiate myself with
the Spanish fascist regime. Another suggestion was
that I lived too well for an author (I have lived
for over thirty-two years in the same house off
Grosvenor Square in Mayfair) -- that to sustain
such a level of living purely from my income as an
author was impossible; the implication being that I
was receiving secret cheques from Nazi fugitives in
South America.

I telephoned my first wife to ask her what her
father had been, and she reminded me that he was an
industrial chemist, a dedicated enemy of the regime
after two of his brothers had been shot by Franco's
men.

It took over a year to establish beyond doubt
who was the author of this infamous document.
Eventually it turned out to have been provided
secretly to the Canadian Government by an
unofficial body based in London, whose name I do
not propose to state in this Court here, as they
are not formally represented in this action.

Suffice it to say that when I applied to a judge
in chambers for leave to take Libel action out of
time, the culprits made no attempt to justify their
Libels, but pleaded that the Statute of Limitations
had run; which plea was allowed, though with
regret, by Mr. Justice Toulson. The mendacious body
concerned then had the temerity to pursue me to the
threshold of the Bankruptcy Court for the legal
costs that it had incurred in that one day hearing,
amounting to over £7,500. It is a rough life,
being an independent author.

Which brings us to the present case. In 1993 the
First Defendant, as they allow in their Witness
Statements, published Denying the Holocaust, the
work complained of, within the jurisdiction,
written by the Second Defendant.

The book purports to be a scholarly
investigation of the operations of an international
network conspiracy of people whom the Second
Defendant has dubbed "Holocaust deniers". It is
not. The phrase itself, which the Second Defendant
prides she herself on having coined and crafted,
appears repeatedly throughout the work, and it has
subsequently become embedded in the vernacular of a
certain kind of journalist who wishes to blacken
the name of some person, where the more usual
rhetoric of neo-Nazi, Nazi, racist, and other
similar epithets is no longer deemed adequate.
Indeed, the phrase appears over 300 times in just
one of the Defendants' experts reports!

It has become one of the most potent phrases in
the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the
F-word, and a whole alphabet of other slurs. If an
American politician, like Mr. Patrick Buchanan, is
branded even briefly a "Holocaust denier", his
career can well be said to be in ruins. If a
writer, no matter how well reviewed and received
until then, has that phrase stuck to him, then he
too regard his career as rumbling off the edge of a
precipice.

As a phrase it is of itself quite meaningless.
The word "Holocaust" is a artificial label commonly
attached to one of the greatest and still most
unexplained tragedies of this past century.

The word "denier" is particularly evil: because
no person in full command of his mental faculties,
and with even the slightest understanding of what
happened in World War Two, can deny that the
tragedy actually happened, however much we
dissident historians may wish to quibble about the
means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae.

Yet meaningless though it is, the phrase has
become a part of the English language. It is a
poison to which there is virtually no antidote,
less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed
in the neck, but deadly all the same: for the
chosen victim, it is like being called a wife
beater or a pædophile. It is enough for the
label to be attached, for the attachee to find
himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star.

In many countries now where it was considered
that the mere verbal labelling was not enough,
governments have been prevailed upon to pass the
most questionable laws, including some which can
only be considered a total infringement of the
normal human rights of free speech, free opinion
and freedom of assembly.

Germany has not had an enviable reputation in
any of these freedoms over the last century. True
to form, in Germany it is now a criminal offence to
question the mode, the scale, the system, or even
the statistics of the Holocaust. No defence is
allowed. Some good friends of mine, I have no
hesitation in allowing to this Court, are sitting
at this very moment in German prisons for having
ventured to voice such questions.

In France the situation is even more absurd: any
person found guilty in France, under a new law
aptly named an "amendment of the law on the freedom
of the Press" finds himself fined, or imprisoned,
or both. This law, passed in 1991, makes it a
criminal offence to challenge (the French word is
contester) any war crimes or crimes against
humanity "as defined by the Nuremberg Statute" of
1945.

Fifty years on, it has become a criminal offence
to question whether Nuremberg got it right. History
is to be as defined by the four victorious powers
in the Nuremberg trials of 1945--1946.

I respectfully submit that Your Lordship would
find such laws, if enacted in this country, to be
utterly repugnant. For that same reason I have no
hesitation in saying that some more good friends of
mine have been fined under precisely this French
law. Indeed, in 1993 or 1994, I was myself fined
the sum of £500 under this law: I had given an
interview to a French journalist in the study of my
home in London; this interview was published in a
reputable journal, there were complaints in Paris;
and I was summoned before the Paris magistrates,
and fined along with the publisher, editor and
journalist concerned for having given this
interview. It is indeed a very sorry state of
affairs.